monthly desktop update

It has been exactly one month since my last desktop post. Here you go:

Lefty:

Righty:

Wallpaper courtesy of j3concepts.

time for a change

I’ve been using this setup and making minor tweaks to it for about a month now, so I feel it’s time for a change. But before I started working on something new I figured I should throw this up here as I really enjoyed the color scheme and fonts that I used. As far as function, I really didn’t change much past my previous desktop setup other than the location of my rocketdock, which is now more clean looking and has cleared more open space on my right monitor.

Wallpaper: Bokeh
10-foot-HUD font: Coolvetica

the fruit of too much labor

I have a confession.

I am addicted to tinkering with my desktop UI. It started many years ago when I first started skinning my old XP machine and trying to mod apps to do little things differently and is now to the point where I’ve tried to make my Vista machine look as unlike stock as possible. Admittedly, a lot what I do is just for looks, but I have also streamlined a lot of common tasks and have made my desktop much more powerful and quick. I figure it’s about time that I post a little walkthrough of my desktop and some links to hopefully peak some interest in any readers to maybe make your own desktop better suited for your taste.

Here is my current setup:

(click any of the photos for a larger size)

You really can’t see what’s going on very clearly at this size, but it’s enough to get a basic idea of my goal. My left monitor is set up for simplicity and maximum workspace. I generally have my main app (firefox/openoffice/game/photoshop) maximized on this monitor, with a to-do list on the sidebar.

My right monitor is set up to be a launch point for my most used apps/folders as well as an information hub. Ok, so that’s the basic idea, lets get a bit more in depth.

Left monitor:

I am running the Transblack v1 visual style, this changes the look of my bottom taskbar, start-menu, and explorer. For a simple guide on how to use custom visual styles see this Lifehacker step by step. I really love how simple and clean this style is, click here to see what my windows and start menu look like.

My sidebar is running in Rainmeter, an extremely powerful system meter app. I would heavily recommend this program to anybody who wants to really mix things up a bit. It’s incredibly easy to mix and match parts of other people’s configs that you like, the only trick is that to customize your own you need to do some good ol’ coding in notepad. This took me a bit to learn at first, but eventually I started to learn the tricks to mod the skins to my will. The majority of my Rainmeter skins are from the wonderful Enigma 2.0 pack. It’s a very helpful package that is great for people trying to find an easy way to learn Rainmeter. My to-do list and calender are also a part of the pack. The to-do list has become an indispensable part of my work flow, it really helps make sure that I prioritize what needs to be done and also acts as a parking lot for things I want to pursue but don’t have the time for. It’s a definite upgrade from Vista’s sticky notes. If I click the check mark in the upper right it opens the notepad file to add/delete things from the list, it’s all very simple.

Between the to-do and calender is my currently playing music. What you see is CD Art Display, which is a simple but powerful music display app, my actual music player is Foobar2000. I heavily modified the Engigma skin for CD Art Display to make it better fit my sidebar. My favorite change was modifying the progress bar so that it doubles as a divider, it blends in perfectly with the bar above my calendar and to-do list.

Unseen is one of my favorite little tools — Launchy. Pressing alt+spacebar ‘beckons’ Launchy to the center of my screen where I can use it to quickly open apps, do math, post events to my Google Calendar, search for files, search Youtube/IMDB/Google/Wikipedia. This incredibly lightweight app has allowed me to do away with ugly quick launch and application launchers.

Another great, behind the scenes app is Maxto. Since I no longer use the Vista sidebar, maximizing apps will take over my sidebar, making it useless. Maxto allows me to partition each monitor into separate areas so that now when I maximize an app it won’t cover up my sidebar.

Right monitor:

As you can clearly see, this monitor has a lot more going on.

The bottom taskbar is yet another touch of Rainmeter. I again use Maxto to keep windows from maximizing over top of it. From left to right there is a CPU meter, RAM meter, HDD meter, and temperature display. Each of these is a heavily tweaked Rainmeter skin that I took from other people’s configs and made my own. I’m trying to come up with ideas on how to give the four items a more consistent look, but I don’t expect to get to that any time soon.

The clock in the upper left and weather in the lower right are a beautifully simple Rainmeter skin called 10-foot-HUD. These configs are extremely easy to modify to fit your color/transparency/font desires. I love the simple, yet creative look they give.

On the left side of this monitor is Rocketdock. This app is very similar to the program bar that all Mac users are used to. I use this as a launch point for my most used apps and folders. It’s very helpful to never need to minimize my main window to open anything. Between Rocketdock and Launchy I have been able to turn off my desktop icons altogether. I also run the Stacks docklet which gives my dock the Mac-ish ability to open stacks. My ‘docs’ and ‘dwnl’ folders make use of this docklet, allowing me very quick access to nearly all of my most files and folders. I’m also using the Reflections icon pack. Here’s a little screenie of stacks in action:

On the far right is Digsby. This might be my single favorite program. It is a very easy to use program that manages my AIM, Facebook, Facebook chat, Gmail, Yahoomail, and Twitter. Even if you don’t use many of these things, it’s worth the download just for it’s lightweight instant email updates and making Facebook chat actually usable. (Obviously it normally shows people’s names, however I’ve removed them from this photo)

There are a handful of other apps not shown on my desktop that I love and couldn’t live without:

Last.fm - Not UI related, but still fun. This program ‘scrobbles’ all the music you listen to on your social profile and recommends other bands to you accordingly. It also has a great free radio service. Feel free to friend me if you use this.

Taskbar Shuffle - Allows you to reorder your taskbar items by simple click-and-drag and close windows by middle clicking their icon.

Wiz Mouse - This is a MUST for anybody with multiple monitors and very helpful even if you only have one. It simply allows you to scroll in a window that is not in focus. This may seem incredibly trivial, but once you use it you’ll realize how stupidly helpful it is!

Power Menu - Allows you to adjust the transparency of any application (even one’s without default transparency) and also set application priority. I use this program to make Digsby transparent. Extremely low resourse usage—246kb average for me.

Ultramon - (beware: costs $) Great program for multiple monitor setups. The best feature is the separate taskbar you get for your second monitor. Although I no longer use that feature, it’s still very helpful for managing my wallpapers.

So there you have a (hopefully) helpful guide to my desktop. I hope that at least a few people will use some of these ideas to get creative with their own computers. The majority of my ideas and programs for my habitual UI tinkering come from Lifehacker and the Flickr Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Pool. I get many of my skins, icons, and wallpapers from DeviantArt. Other good wallpaper sites are InterfaceLIFT, Socialwall, and Desktopography (my favorite).

I still hope to make many changes. I’d like to try Snackr, Litestep, and TeraCopy when I get the time, and I’d really like to do some more radical wallpaper integration stuff.

Please ask me any questions you have regarding UI tweaking and let me know if you make any changes of your own!

WIP

My desktop as of today. Thus far I am running Steel Flash / Rainmeter / 10-Foot-HUD / Digsby / Rocketdock / Stacks.

As soon as I get the chance expect my quicklaunch to be replaced by Launchy, and a cleaner windows shell.

Please click the photo to see a more detailed version (fyi, the black bar on the bottom of my right monitor is due to resolution differences). Once I get a desktop I’m more proud of, I’ll post my sources and some helpful links.